Being a foreigner I do recognize the dynamic described in the article on some level, merely by observing the American culture from the outside, but I hadn't realized it's such a serious and pervasive sentiment——or is it?
Maybe there's a bias such as the overmothering behaviour being overpresented in the media yet most families and mothers are absolutely regular people as parents, and possibly feeling bad themselves about never reaching the impossible expectations set in the media?
I'd happily read personal experiences here to figure out how much truth there is in it.
Most of this article reads to me like a description of a foreign country, or an alternate universe. Maybe it is my own experience which is not representative, rather than the article, but I don't see parents having trouble criticizing their children when there's cause for it or admitting that they sometimes want to do things without their children.
Most of the article is handwaving. The one part of it that's actually based on a specific event is the writer who got persecuted after saying she loved her husband more than her children. But this is the standard sort of nonsense that happens any time anything catches the attention of fringe crazies. Do something with national reach, and if 0.01% of your audience thinks you're a scumbag for it, you will suffer even if their opinion is not representative. You could write an essay about how chocolate is delicious and you'd still end up getting hated on, no doubt with lots of references to Indonesian fires and such. But there is no American chocolate crisis.
While I think his insights on how we treat our children is amazingly insightful, and I love how it's described as a religion (the point that children are our sacred cows is very good in particular) his attempt to relate it to marriages seems shoehorned at best. There's a lot of problems with the way we treat children, but I think it's relation to marriage is the least of our issues.
But seriously, the whole "children as a religion" point is great. I mean, think of some of the bills and laws that get passed because "think of the children". It's not too different from religious laws.
I don't think it's shoehorned at all. The author makes it clear that marriage should come first and children second because if you lose touch with your husband/wife while focusing solely on your children you will inevitably become miserable with each other and it will rub off not only on your kids but also your marriage. I've heard the same thing from just about any married couple I know.
I don't think he's being insightful at all. All his observations seem to be shallow and his conclusions are weak.
> parenthood became a religion in America...Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children...a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter
Most Americans tend to believe their children come first. This isn't a religion, it's an evolutionary instinct. A species can't continue if its organisms don't put enough effort into their offspring if their offspring are completely defenseless for the first decade of their life and only 3 are born to every female. If I kick a 40-year-old out of my house he'll find a hotel to stay at temporarily and be fine. If I dump a 2-year-old on the street, they'll be roadkill within the hour. Caring more about children isn't any more unique to this time period than it is to this species.
> Another sign of the parenthood religion is that it has become totally unacceptable in our culture to say anything bad about our children, let alone admit that we don’t like them all of the time.
I grew up in a household where my parents weren't afraid to tell the truth to me and it was pretty brutal. There's enough negativity at school that it feels like people are surrounding you at all sides with insecurities. Honesty isn't bad but if your kid goes to public school he already knows where he falls short. Also, saying things behind your kid's back isn't any better. It'll come back around to them.
> Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex.
I don't know where this is coming from. Maybe this was Jesus' ideal for a mom, but nowadays the ideal mom seems to be one that argues over who's carpooling next week and buys their 16-year-old birth control just in case. I think anyone who can could and do laundry probably automatically counts as a good mother nowadays.
I think the problem is the author treats kids more like a car than a living being. Your car's muffler isn't going to get fixed until you admit it's broken. You don't fix your kid by bringing him into the shop one day after work. Being a parent requires being a teacher, boss and friend at the same time. In no way is "owner" ever part of that definition.
> I don't think he's being insightful at all. All his observations seem to be shallow and his conclusions are weak.
Thank you; you put it better than I could.
A small example that demolishes his crackpot theory: we just had a kid a few weeks ago. We have a cat, who has never been around children, and who has never had children. And yet, when the child cries, the cat comes running; and if the cries do not subside soon enough, she'll start howling. And then there's this example: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30893297
"If I dump a 2-year-old on the street, they'll be roadkill within the hour. Caring more about children isn't any more unique to this time period than it is to this species."
OTOH, evolutionary, if you die, that 2-year-old and its siblings do not have a bright future, either. If that 2-year-old dies its sibling may survive. Even if it is your only child, you may be able to bring another child into the world.
If you model this, I expect that you can make either strategy optimal, depending on small twists to your model's parameters (increase family ties a bit, and chances are that 2 year old will get adopted; increase child mortality, and that 2-year-old may only count as half a 10-year-old in terms of expected number of surviving children, even if its parents stay around to care for it)
It's just anecdotal, I've found that my siblings and friends with kids are pretty up front about the negative attributes of their kids. So the "parenthood religion" isn't necessarily universal.
I think it's still a good article. It comes down to balance in the end, I think. Kids are just another thing in your life that you have to balance—more plates to spin. If you're only spinning your children's plates, it seems obvious that your job and relationship plates are going to eventually fall...
He's generalizing way too much. There are so many different subcultures, which each have their own style of parenting, and even within them parenting varies person to person too much to generalize like this.
A. Teller is probably more interesting to HN folks because he's head of Google X. This seems incongruous a little bit and then you see how people in Palo Alto parent...
This is related to the "obnoxious Little League Dad" phenomenon. Most of us have some disappointments about our lives. The way that some parents deal with those is to imagine that their children will succeed where they have failed. Once parents pay more attention to the image of a child than to the actual child, craziness ensues.
I never understood the sentiment of valuing babies over all else. To me it always seemed obvious that fresh college graduates are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them. Babies on the other hand are easily replaced.
I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually people think I'm just trolling when I'm stating my opinion on the matter but I'm dead serious.
Yeah, but a baby hasn't chosen a major, developed any mental illnesses, experienced any crippling trauma, or really done anything at all yet. A fresh college graduate is very often set for life when it comes to their career, brand preferences, political beliefs, religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, etc. but babies have a lot more variability in terms of possible outcome.
Oh come on -- that's orthogonal to the point being made. However you define "success," it is true that some subgroup will have a higher potential of being successful than the average, i.e. all babies. Babies have the widest potential, but not the greatest potential.
When your kid is still a baby, you can dream that he/she will become a neurosurgeon or an astronaut. By the time the child has actually grown up and graduated with a degree in French poetry, your best hopes for them are dead.
Sounds like you shouldn't have children. If all that matters to you is being an astronaut or neurosurgeon or some other high-prestige but low-happiness job then you should do it yourself and stop talking about it on the internet: don't impose your twisted moral system where you judge human worth based on wealth on an innocent child who might create beautiful art or invent something new some day.
It's the same "logic" that values a startup without a product more highly than one with a product because if the product hasn't been developed yet, it could be amazing, but if it has, then we already know its not.
It is delayed onset of buyers remorse. When you have a baby you are still shopping, you don't know what type of adult you have created yet. Sometimes you'll end up producing the person that cures cancer and have no remorse. When you're looking at the college tuition bills for your offspring that has switched their major from Psychology to Philosophy to Art History to Archaeology you start to wonder if you could have made different choices.
Roughly 34% of Americans go on to complete college. Strictly and mathematically speaking, the fresh college graduates are a much better bet than babies.
College grads are a "better bet" in terms of the probability that they'll succeed, but not in terms of additional investment making a difference. Spend time or money on/with a recent college grad who's already primed to succeed, and neither you nor society will get much that you wouldn't have already. Spend that same time or money on/with a child whose mind is still malleable and whose future is still uncertain . . now you're talking about a real possibility of making a difference.
In many "isolated" cultures, elderlies are actually considered more valuable than babies because of all their knowledge. When an old person passes away it is considered a great damage to the tribe, while losing a baby is meaningless since the baby didn't know anything.
This might have been true in Western civilization up until 18th century. Since industrial revolution started the pace at which the world is changing is so fast that by the time you reach your 70s most of your knowledge and life experience is already obsolete. That's why we leave elderly alone in nursing homes instead of keeping them close to use their wisdom.
This shouldn't be downvoted, because its part of the argument. eg, still-born babies tend to have lots of emotional reprecussions. But the OP's point is that doesn;t make much sense. eg, the human female is programmed to reproduce every 28 days or whatever... but herein lies the heart of the issue...biology, rationality, and emotion, ane even culture are all (or may be) at cross purposes when it comes to this situation.
I at least down voted it because, the comment it was quoting from was supposed to be a "purely economic argument" and it acknowledged that most argument come from an emotional view point.
There are valid points that go a long the lines of the comment and your follow ups starts to add them but:
In terms of a 'purely economic argument', you have none. You're referring to a sunk cost:
"are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them"
"In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that economic actors should not let sunk costs influence their decisions. Doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
He has a perfectly valid economic argument. He's not saying it's the sunk cost that provides the value, it's the added overall value they provide by having a college education. The cost of getting that education could be a reasonable proxy for the value of the education, though imperfect.
People usually make the sunk cost mistake when they aren't evaluating the immediate potential of the options, just the emotional tie to the money invested. That's not the case here.
The point is that the cost of the college grad is not a basis for economic decision making. Once the cost has been accrued, it's sunk. If we're making a decision based on whether or not we want to sacrifice the baby or the college grad, we can't take into account sunk cost of the college grad (if we're using economics as the basis of our argument).
> The point is that the cost of the college grad is not a basis for economic decision making.
The common assumption that ajmurmann and vasiliys are likely working form is that value has been retained during the ~20 years of investment and the cost is proportional to the value and there cost is a reasonable proxy for value.
It is an assumption that does not always hold, but is common enough to do as a first order approximation.
But because we are not making an investment decision, there is no sunk cost fallacy. If we have two widgets and invest a lot of money into making the first widget better, and indeed it becomes better, it is not a sunk cost fallacy to call the first one more valuable.
In terms of a single society it would make more economic sense to stop having children, import foreign collage graduates, and execute people once they reach retirement age.
But society, luckily, isn't some autonomous macro-organism that can treat people like individual cells in your body. So when we say that we value babies above all else that's a projection of the individual aspirations of the members of that society.
An average member of society will care much more about the health of their family and children than maximizing the GDP of their country, and government policy and rhetoric luckily at least partially reflects this.
The sentiment is correct, but even an average member of society who has to choose between two children is better off with the college grad than the incessant consumer whose cortex hasn't folded yet.
The only valid explanation I can think of for our obsession with babies is evolutionary - you need some overkill hormonal persuasion to bond with babies. So every individual who has gone through such a period has some understanding of other individuals' love for babies - they're being empathetic when they hear someone say "I love my baby more than anything".
I think both you and the parent I was replying to are guilty of the same fallacy: transposing economic value on the individual level to society at large.
People at large want to have kids, they want to not die from treatable illnesses. Even when those two goals are at odds with optimal economic realities societies will still try to attain them, because we build societies and economies as a means to an end to attain our goals, we don't live our lives purely to satisfy economic efficiencies.
We're an organism that's the product of billions of years of evolution, all organisms try to spread their genes to the next generation. To say that you're better off with one child who's a collage graduate than two who aren't might be true economically, but ignores what's fundamentally driving us all forward as an organism.
Does anyone really think the primacy of reproduction can be superseded by some clever economic theories?
> fresh college graduates are most valuable to society
This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN.
It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.
I strongly agree that we need a healthy mix. However, for fresh college graduates there is more time left to pay off the investment we made in them as a society. In fact I believe they will be at their most productive a little later than that. But they get there as they get older.
I think the more important question is how many college grads actually benefit from their education (modified words italicized). A degree in, say, forestry should still be useful for someone working in sales because of the experience dealing with diverse opinions, processing new information, and studying a range of subjects.
This is anecdotal, and not a very controversial opinion, but many people in my family and group of friends are sociology majors. After watching them grow and knowing them pre and post degree, I can without a doubt say that education is beneficial. What you learn is unimportant. Becoming acquainted with the process of learning is the true benefit of education.
I agree that the college angle adds unnecessary assumptions to the argument. It would probably be easier to agree on "young adults ready to enter the work force". Especially given the tremendous value many drop outs are adding.
Valuable maybe not but they do represent the peak of societal sunk cost which we won't be recouping.
20 years into your career we've recovered a lot of that invested value, whereas right out of college is near or at the point that the handover of civilization between generations actually happens.
You're right that we don't want the world running around full of fresh college grads however since they are college grads we can say with much greater certainty that they'll be successful as opposed to having no idea with a baby or toddler.
Those fresh college graduates now are the very kids the article talks about, unable to make the adjustment to not being the center of someone's universe. When they were kids, kids were the most valuable. When they're fresh college graduates, fresh college graduates are the most valuable. I think we all know what tune they'll be playing when they hit 30.
The purely economic argument is not about which is the bigger sunk cost. It's not about which will create the most total economic value, either. It's about the delta in economic value from additional investment. College grads are already on an upward trajectory. Statistically and as a group, they're likely to create significant value without any additional investment. Babies, on the other hand, are entirely unrealized potential. Significant investment is still necessary.
In a way, your argument works against your conclusion. The more you've already spent, the less remains to be spent before the person takes off on their own trajectory. Fresh grads don't scale like startups do. They don't need ever-increasing investment to keep up with growth. They're (ideally) more like established companies, already capable of generating their own income and no longer in need of infusions from outside. They don't need our attention as much as babies do. That's why we call them incubators. ;)
Yes, I disagree with the "obvious" conclusion that college graduates are most valuable. Additionally, I think the argument put forward supposedly in support of that conclusion - i.e. that we've invested more in graduates - actually leads to the exact opposite conclusion. As others have pointed out, it's not valid economics but pure sunk-cost fallacy.
Not extrapolating a visceral disagreement with someone to either a condemnation of that person or a diagnosis of mental illness or dysfunction seems almost like the essence of HN civility.
"Don't call people sociopaths" seemed almost too banal to comment on, but this is is a pattern that recurs several times a day on HN.
This does seem a little extreme. I don't know many parents that are so child centric that they "have nothing left to say to each other".
On the other hand if you compare parenting in th 1970s there does seem to be something to the argument that parenting went from an occupation to a professional sport, where people compete at it. I object more to the tiger parenting where kids have to be at the top of their class, get in to MIT or Stanford, all that pressure. It's not healthy.
1) This comparison to me says more about religion than it does about parenting. Unconditional love and devotion to your baby? The feeling is physical, and the baby is real. To be able to invoke the same feelings for a deity appears more magical to me than parenting, especially for those who have never experienced having a child.
2) American parenting isn't killing marriage. Marriages are killed one at a time by the unique parents that choose to do so. And that's the problem with statistical conceptualizations. It rarely applies to you for those dealing with it at the present. Only in hindsight do the numbers compile anyway, so it really isn't all that helpful.
Anyone in a marriage knows that the will to be together is sacrosanct. Once two capable independent adults decide to part ways, nothing could be easier. The past could have been wonderful, and it's easy to feel good about what was good. But for many couples, divorce is the choice, and often a good choice for them. In other cultures, there are more bonds holding couples together. In the US, it's far easier to be independent or marry again. It's easier to live your life on your terms than on that of social perception or social dogma. Is this a good thing? Who are we to judge? If you feel the stats are tilted in the wrong direction, then we can try and tip it the other way with our own marriages. But "for the stats" is not usually what crosses our minds when we're not getting along.
This is a classic case of "is as does". Nothing is killing anything. This is the shape of the new American marriage.
I'm not so sure that "Once two capable independent adults decide to part ways, nothing could be easier." Particularly when children are involved, it can be very messy, very ugly, and ruinous for one or both parties, mentally and financially. Even in an ideal DINK relationship, depending on the state you live in, it can be difficult to come to a clean, amicable break, without ongoing obligations.
It certainly is easier to live one's life on one's own terms. Indeed, that might be the only way to live one's life, in the long term. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance when choosing a partner to make sure that both parties have compatible terms.
It's true that having kids does make everything more complicated, and they provide a reason to stick together. But it isn't stopping parents from divorcing completely, just less than if they didn't have children. And seeing all of those divorced with children, it makes it more difficult, but not difficult enough. For better or for worse, we do it anyway.
Of course, the opposite is also true. When two capable independent adults decide to stick together, there really isn't anything that could keep them apart. Isn't that the beauty of it? This has been at the heart of the western philosophy of marriage.
We've spared the rod for too long, IMHO. Not saying we should abuse our kids or even reprimand them physically necessarily, however seeing a two year old as anything more than a terrorist whom cannot be negotiated with, can have detrimental consequences in their adulthood. Boundaries must be drawn early on or else....
Your statement is a performative contradiction. Your proposition is that a two-year old is akin to a terrorist who cannot be negotiated with, but your suggesting boundaries be drawn as a resolution presupposes that in fact they can be negotiated with (negotiation necessarily implying the setting of boundaries), hence negating your point.
Wait, are you saying you can negotiate with terrorist or with 2 year olds? I have no experience with terrorists, but I have five kids. There are absolutely times when a two year cannot be negotiated with. And there are times children have to be taught that under no uncertain times their current behavior is acceptable. And that time is a temper tantrum.
I've 2 kids... and you catch my drift - they act (sometimes) like terrorists, and that is when you cannot negotiate, meaning, your word is absolute. Otherwise, any negotiation when they are acting like terrorists usually would end at their peril (yours too, probably), for they not know what they do. This is what I mean, "don't negotiate with terrorists".
Of course, at other times you can negotiate, and they get the tradeoffs rather than being absolute in their attitude, sticking to their guns, without thinking.
It is an ongoing commitment, a 'battle' of staying present, guiding them, drawing a line when necessary, and letting them win too... It is absolutely through contradictinction they will learn the most - what worked once, may or may not work again, behavior wise.... of course, there are absolutes - don't kill or hurt others, don't lie, cheat or steal...those are usually easier to teach. And then there's wisdom...that's lifetime learning.
He's saying that beating children doesn't help because they cannot be negotiated with. Children don't have the brain development to respond to threats. It's like beating someone with an epileptic seizure until he stops. That doesn't mean disruptive behavior doesn't have to be or can't be dealt with, just that beating children ('so they'll think twice next time') doesn't have positive effects (i.e. it doesn't stop or prevent the behavior next time) but it does have negative effects (teaches violence, weakens the trust bond, etc.)
For anyone who's interested in the rise in divorce rates, I highly recommend the book "The Two Income Trap". It basically tries to prove that the transition to dual income households damaged the financial security of many families. Pair this with the fact that the number one cause of fighting and divorce is money, and you have a better explanation than what this article provides.
I highly recommend the book "The Two Income Trap". It basically tries to prove that the transition to dual income households damaged the financial security of many families
A great book. It can also be read profitably in conjunction with Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High. School districts are weirdly tied to real estate in the U.S.; many places with good districts also have severe land-use control laws that prevent the creation of new housing units on a given parcel land; and, consequently, people will pay a lot of money for scarce housing that comes bundled with good school districts. Two-earner households make paying for the housing easier, but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile (especially considering the prevalence of divorce).
> School districts are weirdly tied to real estate in the U.S.
Rich people want nicer schools. These same people have a lot of influence and or control in our society, so they dictate how the money was divvied up, to make sure their kids got the best.
In many other countries the money is put into a large "pot" and then redistributed from that. So most schools per student budget is similar but with adjustments for cost of living. The US is actually the odd duck for how monied some public schools are, while depriving almost impoverishing others.
Charter schools only make the situation worse, since many utilise public funds while also charging parents (so effectively a private school that keeps poor kids out, but gets to utilise public money to do so).
Everyone wants nicer schools. Wealthier people are more likely to be able to live in areas with good schools; they can pay for the rents and mortgages necessary to do so.
I encourage you to read the aforementioned books. I believe the person you're responding to was just trying to point out that this issue is bigger than just rich people fixing the game.
> but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile
Can you elaborate on that? It doesn't make sense to me. When we were on a single income in my family, it felt a lot more fragile than now that we have two incomes.
Most people on two incomes didn't decide to do so voluntarily. They did so because they couldn't afford not to.
So, instead of having a household where you have one parent working to support the family and another parent who can occasionally add income but doesn't have to, now you have lots of people where they are fully tapped out and both parents are working full time.
Potentially a two income household allows it's expenses to grow to take advantage of both incomes to some extent.
As a couple with two high incomes you actually have to try really hard not to let expenses get to the point where you can't live without both incomes. So in effect you now have 1 big income that you rely on.
In terms of the fragility, there is more chance of losing 1 out of 2 jobs (i.e. 50% of the income) than there is of losing 1 out of 1 jobs (i.e. 100% of the income). (I hope I explained this right - but it's how my thinking goes).
It's explained in the book I mentioned. You would also need to educate yourself on personal finance by reading some other books to get a more holistic picture (The Millionaire Next Door is a good place to start).
There's three things you need to understand about personal finance:
1. The first is that shit happens and most people don't plan for it (because they haven't been educated on personal finance). Most resources suggest that you keep an emergency fund of 6-12 months of living expenses saved up for when shit happens. We know that most people do not have this. I'm not even going to bother providing a source because there are so many sources on how Americans don't save.
2. The number one expense for any given household is going to be housing (whether owned or rented).
3. While you can cutback on many things, you cannot cutback on a mortgage. So if there are permanent setbacks to your finances: someone loses their job and gets another one that pays less, someone gets hurt and can't work for a while or ends up on disability, someone has to stay home to take care of an unhealthy relative, etc, then you can be pretty much shit out of luck unless you're house has equity on it and you can sell and downsize (although most people will just take a loan out against their equity lol).
So these are the characters of our stage. If you get a mortgage based on 1 person's income and something happens, there is another person there to step up. This provides a powerful safety net for the family. If you get a mortgage based on both people's incomes, you are putting yourself at greater risk because if something were to happen to either person you would not be able to afford to keep your 15-30 year agreement. And the cost of getting out of that agreement is enormous (as we saw with the recent housing crash).
I encourage you to read more on personal finance. It's incredibly fascinating.
I'm not sure how you would like me to answer false assertions? Especially since my post is clearly about people with a mortgage (as is the book I recommended). The best I can do is point you in the right direction to properly educate yourself.
I guess we're covered then :) We' re still working on building an emergency fund the size we want, but it's already there to cover us for at least half a year.
Right now we pay more than what we'd like on rent, but next year we'll move to a cheaper place.
We're saving for a large down payment for when it comes time to buy a home. Also, we'll get a mortgage as if only one of us were working, we have already agreed on that. And we're planning on moving to a state with a low cost of living when that time comes.
Two income households are usually households that depend on two incomes. In other words instead of basing your standard of living on one income you base your standard of living on two. So both incomes are required to pay your rent/mortgage/water bill/insurance/car payments/etc.
It is more fragile because 1) it encourages living well beyond your means and 2) the odds of job loss/income reduction is now doubled and the stakes are higher as the second partner can't get a job to pick of the slack in the event of job loss.
It goes back to the old observation that people living paycheck to paycheck on $30,000 tend to also live paycheck to paycheck if their income increases to $60,000.
So if there is a hypothetical one income family making $40,000/year is unable to pay bills instead of reducing spending (who wants to do that?) the other partner starts working. Their lifestyle tends to rise with income and now they are just getting by with $60,000/year and put themselves in a more fragile place. This is how people tend to behave.
Instead they could have reigned in on their expenses a bit and perhaps taken on a second income to save for a rainy day.
The way to do two incomes (if at all possible) is to base your standard of living on just one. Use the other income to invest, save, or fuck around (travel, dinner, etc.). This type of two income house is much less fragile as savings and investments can accumulate, emergencies are easily taken care of, and spending can be reeled in in case of financial heartship. Either way with two incomes savings should be a very high priority to reduce fragility.
So two income households certainly can be less fragile but often aren't in practice.
Thanks, I guess I should have deduced that myself. In my case both my wife and I are software engineers making really good salaries, so we definitely don't need both of us to be working. We don't even do it on purpose but looking at our lifestyle it is definitely on a level that could be sustained with only one of our salaries :)
This is both a great article and a mediocre article. I agree with others that the marriage aspect is the weakest part.
As a parent, I constantly think back to the 70s as a benchmark for open mindedness and freedom with my children. In my honest opinion, we've lost a lot of perspective and become much less tolerant. In Australia, someone called the police because children walked a short distance to the local park by themselves. Taking a photo at a swimming carnival is taboo. None of these attitudes were around in the 70s.
I felt the relationship aspects between adults missed the mark. Not only the relationship breakdown aspects, but the women and sex. That reminds me of the woman who runs she++ (a sexist business name that no one calls out) who said in a Forbes interview that sex was bad and a man thing. There is a social stigma in admitting that women can like sex. Even Sam Mechkovich from Ars commented about bond women not falling for bond in his Spectre review, because that's not a woman thing to like sex. My response to these people is "what's wrong with it?" Most of the women I know and respect are open about sex. That doesn't mean free sex, it means being open minded and confident in yourself to be free to speak your mind. My sort of people...
Ultimately, I lump all these social and parental problems down to Political Correctness. For the nay sayers, you can treat people with respect and not be PC. PC is a set of perverted rules that bully people into what to think.
>> Ultimately, I lump all these social and parental problems down to Political Correctness. For the nay sayers, you can treat people with respect and not be PC. PC is a set of perverted rules that bully people into what to think.
I have been told, "You can't say that, we have to be open minded here" when expressing the belief that political correctness does more to damage discourse than almost any other idea in western society. Way to provide a demonstration of my point!
Isn't the perverse fairness of giving equal time to clearly unequal opinions (/science/facts/etc) worse discourse than political correctness? Of course PC can and does wade into over sensitivity but it also includes the idea that you should err on the side of safety when using words that can be terribly hurtful to some people. It's not our place to decide that it's not in fact hurtful.
But it must be countered by the fact that some valid opinions of today were the silliest of the past.
Consider how many things we accept as valid today (say opinions related to equality) were once almost blasphemous to mention. It would be arrogant of us to assume we are not making similar mistakes.
I'm just worried that among progressives of the past, many open minded positions of today would have been 'opening your mind til your brain fell out'. Consider what people would've said a century ago if you brought up homosexuals marrying or transsexual acceptance. What today seems a strange to use as those concepts seemed a to progressives a century ago?
> child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home.
there are couples like this because the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works. after ten years of this, you don't actually know your spouse any more - they've been living some life, but not one that you've had time to be a part of between your own career and your children.
this seems like an equally plausible explanation for this phenomenon, because when you sacrifice that much it must be for something and when someone else insinuates that maybe the sacrifice wasn't worth it, well, that would really piss you off...
> the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works.
Who sets up their schedules like that in the middle class? Middle class jobs don't (typically) allow that one parent could work from 7-4 and another from 4-1am.
This isn't a bad train of thought, though I wonder if this says more about Millennial narcissism than it does about the "religion of parenting".
I think this has more to do with a kind of ethical posturing ("I am holier than thou") than it is about a sacred cow. There are parents who will give up their own interests for the sake of their children's interest, and not because there is peer-pressure to do so, or as a way to gain status within the community, or to be tyrannized by a cultural myth.
So thinking about it more, I think this article is BS -- not because the issues it raises are not true, but because it focused on the wrong thing.
There is also a spiritual and psychological transformation that takes place with becoming a parent.
Philosopher Ken Wilber had written extensively about modernity, and the way it throws pre-modern ideas such as the Great Chain of Being out the window, leaving members of modernity disconnected with their place in the universe. That's not to say that pre-modern ideas where they just told you where your place is a good idea. On the other hand, existential angst and a constant wondering of your place in society, in the world, in the universe as a whole is a constant them in the cultures of modernity.
What does this have to do with parenting? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is a kind of stand-in, or abstractions, that Ken Wilber claims ties the pre-modern religion together. They disagree on a lot of things, but one thing that is present in the religious teachings is putting the human experience in context of the cosmos as a whole. The search for the meaning of life was a search for your origins, of where you came from -- a search for who you were "born" from. It might seem obvious that your body was born from the DNA of both of your parents; however, where did they come from? If you trace things up your lineage, you still come to the question, "Where did life originate from?"
To use the mythic language in the context of the Great Chain of Being, you were "born" from the universe.
To become a parent is to experience -- just a little bit -- of what it is like for the universe to give life and creation. It might be accidental or intentional. Someone might enter this stage with naivete or with great wisdom. There are a lot of things you might have railed against growing up, but now as a parent, it makes you think and wonder.
My point is that, if you were to strip away the ethical posturing and political correctness, what you are left with is not a re-examination of parenting, that there is a sacred cow to be slaughtered. Parenting is an re-examination of your self and your place and purpose within the universe. Your growth does not stop there. You might gain a better appreciation of how things come together.
"Ayelet Waldman, where the author explained that she loved her husband more than her four children."
Recently did some pre-marital counseling where they recommend that you put your spouse above your children. Seemed really strange to me and counter-intuitive. I don't know much about marriage at all, but if you think about it, the trickle-down effect does seem to make sense as setting an example is a good lesson for kids.
I think the takeaway is to keep a balance. Also, it's not like Ayelet Waldman is a revolutionary, as other old-school practitioners seem to have been recommending that advice for years.
counseling where they recommend that you put your spouse above your children
I believe this is incredibly important for a lasting, loving relationship. I've observed a few relationships where one partner's priority shifts so much to the children that the other partner is left with little love or consideration and their bond quickly degrades.
I could understand this behavior in a place where there's a shortage of food and resources, but in developed countries with an abundance of food and relative safety people are sabotaging their happiness and adult bonds by elevating developing humans above the person they originally committed to.
Additionally, some adults infantilize their household culture to the point where adult activities become a sort of taboo. I think we short-change children by not exposing them to regular adult behaviors and conversations. Certainly there are some things children should not be exposed to but the household should be as accommodating for old and young as possible. A healthy balance needs to be struck.
To me, parenting is like Atlas lifting up the world. It may seem logical to focus entirely on the object of importance (the world), but if Atlas doesn't eat right he will start to wane. His bones will lose their density and he'll start to lose muscle mass. Eventually, he won't be able to lift the world. My relationship with my wife is just that. The more we put into each other, the stronger we become individually and as a pair.
Your kids will adjust to the lifestyle you set for them and happy parents have more to give.
Putting your spouse before your children is not only essential to a healthy and happy marriage, it is also essential to raising well adjusted children.
This is extreme. I read this article when it made the rounds last year, and I hated it just as much this time around. Disclaimer: I'm a parent, and I love it. I also love being in a relationship with someone I trust and with whom I can talk about 'grown-up' shit.
Granted, there are definitely parents who hover, worry, or interfere with their kids', but, at least in the circles I run in, these are the exception more than the rule and most certainly don't represent parents (or marriages) at large.
>The origins of the parenthood religion are obscure
"The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on 1920."
Womens suffrage has to reverb through political sphere. As a whole it's not good or bad, just different. Another thing coming from there: time passed since women gained vote seems to correlate with welfare spending.
I don't think religious fervor can be avoided in a society. It's just a matter of where it is directed.
Interestingly, I've asked many of my female friends, including my last few girlfriends, given the hypothetical choice of saving their husband or their child, who would they save? Almost all of them said their children.
Ask the men, however, and it is almost always the wife.
And none of these folks were married or had kids yet. It is something ingrained from before that occurs.
Dad here. I would save the kids, for several reasons:
1. They have more life-years ahead of them.
2. If I saved my wife, she would hate the choice I made and be plagued by survivor guilt or resentment. It's not clear that my marriage would survive this. But the kids are young enough that they would probably accept the choice, to the extent that they could comprehend it.
I would like to understand the relevance of this article to Hacker News. Perhaps it would be helpful if I could see a demographic breakdown of visitors: marital status, age, and number of offspring.
"Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought."
So divorce rates for empty nesters are the kids fault or kids are holding together marriages that were doomed before they left the nest? This article is garbage.
What a dumb article. Seriously, it's simply trolling the late 20-something females who feel a pang of guilt of choosing a career path over kids. And it trolls the late 20-something females who believe they can "have it all" and don't have enough guilt for compromising child-rearing for career-rearing. They're fucking with our heads people.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadMaybe there's a bias such as the overmothering behaviour being overpresented in the media yet most families and mothers are absolutely regular people as parents, and possibly feeling bad themselves about never reaching the impossible expectations set in the media?
I'd happily read personal experiences here to figure out how much truth there is in it.
Most of the article is handwaving. The one part of it that's actually based on a specific event is the writer who got persecuted after saying she loved her husband more than her children. But this is the standard sort of nonsense that happens any time anything catches the attention of fringe crazies. Do something with national reach, and if 0.01% of your audience thinks you're a scumbag for it, you will suffer even if their opinion is not representative. You could write an essay about how chocolate is delicious and you'd still end up getting hated on, no doubt with lots of references to Indonesian fires and such. But there is no American chocolate crisis.
But seriously, the whole "children as a religion" point is great. I mean, think of some of the bills and laws that get passed because "think of the children". It's not too different from religious laws.
> parenthood became a religion in America...Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children...a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter
Most Americans tend to believe their children come first. This isn't a religion, it's an evolutionary instinct. A species can't continue if its organisms don't put enough effort into their offspring if their offspring are completely defenseless for the first decade of their life and only 3 are born to every female. If I kick a 40-year-old out of my house he'll find a hotel to stay at temporarily and be fine. If I dump a 2-year-old on the street, they'll be roadkill within the hour. Caring more about children isn't any more unique to this time period than it is to this species.
> Another sign of the parenthood religion is that it has become totally unacceptable in our culture to say anything bad about our children, let alone admit that we don’t like them all of the time.
I grew up in a household where my parents weren't afraid to tell the truth to me and it was pretty brutal. There's enough negativity at school that it feels like people are surrounding you at all sides with insecurities. Honesty isn't bad but if your kid goes to public school he already knows where he falls short. Also, saying things behind your kid's back isn't any better. It'll come back around to them.
> Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex.
I don't know where this is coming from. Maybe this was Jesus' ideal for a mom, but nowadays the ideal mom seems to be one that argues over who's carpooling next week and buys their 16-year-old birth control just in case. I think anyone who can could and do laundry probably automatically counts as a good mother nowadays.
I think the problem is the author treats kids more like a car than a living being. Your car's muffler isn't going to get fixed until you admit it's broken. You don't fix your kid by bringing him into the shop one day after work. Being a parent requires being a teacher, boss and friend at the same time. In no way is "owner" ever part of that definition.
Thank you; you put it better than I could.
A small example that demolishes his crackpot theory: we just had a kid a few weeks ago. We have a cat, who has never been around children, and who has never had children. And yet, when the child cries, the cat comes running; and if the cries do not subside soon enough, she'll start howling. And then there's this example: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30893297
Is the cat following some religion too? Hogwash.
"Enough effort" is not the same as "Nothing in life is allowed to be more important".
OTOH, evolutionary, if you die, that 2-year-old and its siblings do not have a bright future, either. If that 2-year-old dies its sibling may survive. Even if it is your only child, you may be able to bring another child into the world.
If you model this, I expect that you can make either strategy optimal, depending on small twists to your model's parameters (increase family ties a bit, and chances are that 2 year old will get adopted; increase child mortality, and that 2-year-old may only count as half a 10-year-old in terms of expected number of surviving children, even if its parents stay around to care for it)
I think it's still a good article. It comes down to balance in the end, I think. Kids are just another thing in your life that you have to balance—more plates to spin. If you're only spinning your children's plates, it seems obvious that your job and relationship plates are going to eventually fall...
I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually people think I'm just trolling when I'm stating my opinion on the matter but I'm dead serious.
All babies will turn into all 22 year olds. Only some babies will turn into college graduates.
Therefore some of a population, if selected artificially (i.e. college graduates) will always be better than the whole population (i.e. all babies.)
I completely disagree and as a college graduate I would never say something like that.
A test statement may be: A certain population is at the top of the IQ bell curve therefore they are smarter.
The IQ bell curve being the context.
Well, they will or they will die trying.
Most fresh graduates also become retired seniors. All retired seniors eventually become corpses. Can you maybe see potential declining over time now?
A baby could become anyone.
FCG: fresh college grads (natch) LDE: lame-duck elderlies BMPP: babies; max-potential persons
Someone has never had a baby.
I at least down voted it because, the comment it was quoting from was supposed to be a "purely economic argument" and it acknowledged that most argument come from an emotional view point.
There are valid points that go a long the lines of the comment and your follow ups starts to add them but:
> Someone has never had a baby.
Does not add that detail or those arguments.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-ar...
"are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them"
"In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that economic actors should not let sunk costs influence their decisions. Doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
People usually make the sunk cost mistake when they aren't evaluating the immediate potential of the options, just the emotional tie to the money invested. That's not the case here.
Actually, that's exactly what they said and I even quoted them on it.
Future cost of making a baby productive? ~20 years of varying levels of investment.
The common assumption that ajmurmann and vasiliys are likely working form is that value has been retained during the ~20 years of investment and the cost is proportional to the value and there cost is a reasonable proxy for value.
It is an assumption that does not always hold, but is common enough to do as a first order approximation.
But society, luckily, isn't some autonomous macro-organism that can treat people like individual cells in your body. So when we say that we value babies above all else that's a projection of the individual aspirations of the members of that society.
An average member of society will care much more about the health of their family and children than maximizing the GDP of their country, and government policy and rhetoric luckily at least partially reflects this.
The only valid explanation I can think of for our obsession with babies is evolutionary - you need some overkill hormonal persuasion to bond with babies. So every individual who has gone through such a period has some understanding of other individuals' love for babies - they're being empathetic when they hear someone say "I love my baby more than anything".
People at large want to have kids, they want to not die from treatable illnesses. Even when those two goals are at odds with optimal economic realities societies will still try to attain them, because we build societies and economies as a means to an end to attain our goals, we don't live our lives purely to satisfy economic efficiencies.
We're an organism that's the product of billions of years of evolution, all organisms try to spread their genes to the next generation. To say that you're better off with one child who's a collage graduate than two who aren't might be true economically, but ignores what's fundamentally driving us all forward as an organism.
Does anyone really think the primacy of reproduction can be superseded by some clever economic theories?
This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN.
It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.
Edit: Typos
I guess from an economical sense college is expensive but... I don't know... how many college grads actually use their degree?
20 years into your career we've recovered a lot of that invested value, whereas right out of college is near or at the point that the handover of civilization between generations actually happens.
In a way, your argument works against your conclusion. The more you've already spent, the less remains to be spent before the person takes off on their own trajectory. Fresh grads don't scale like startups do. They don't need ever-increasing investment to keep up with growth. They're (ideally) more like established companies, already capable of generating their own income and no longer in need of infusions from outside. They don't need our attention as much as babies do. That's why we call them incubators. ;)
Becuase you are a sociopath.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. We ban accounts that do this.
This isn't the first time you've broken the site guidelines by being uncivil. Please read the rules and follow them from now on:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
This doesn't stop applying just because someone else did worse. On HN, please post civilly and substantively or not at all.
"Don't call people sociopaths" seemed almost too banal to comment on, but this is is a pattern that recurs several times a day on HN.
> Babies on the other hand are easily replaced
sounds like something a sociopath would say about it.
I mean really, is the answer not obvious? Babies need constant care and attention or they die.
On the other hand if you compare parenting in th 1970s there does seem to be something to the argument that parenting went from an occupation to a professional sport, where people compete at it. I object more to the tiger parenting where kids have to be at the top of their class, get in to MIT or Stanford, all that pressure. It's not healthy.
If anything, the American spending habits are killing the American marriage. Financial issues are the source of countless divorces.
See also Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption: http://www.amazon.com/The-Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revise...
2) American parenting isn't killing marriage. Marriages are killed one at a time by the unique parents that choose to do so. And that's the problem with statistical conceptualizations. It rarely applies to you for those dealing with it at the present. Only in hindsight do the numbers compile anyway, so it really isn't all that helpful.
Anyone in a marriage knows that the will to be together is sacrosanct. Once two capable independent adults decide to part ways, nothing could be easier. The past could have been wonderful, and it's easy to feel good about what was good. But for many couples, divorce is the choice, and often a good choice for them. In other cultures, there are more bonds holding couples together. In the US, it's far easier to be independent or marry again. It's easier to live your life on your terms than on that of social perception or social dogma. Is this a good thing? Who are we to judge? If you feel the stats are tilted in the wrong direction, then we can try and tip it the other way with our own marriages. But "for the stats" is not usually what crosses our minds when we're not getting along.
This is a classic case of "is as does". Nothing is killing anything. This is the shape of the new American marriage.
It certainly is easier to live one's life on one's own terms. Indeed, that might be the only way to live one's life, in the long term. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance when choosing a partner to make sure that both parties have compatible terms.
Of course, the opposite is also true. When two capable independent adults decide to stick together, there really isn't anything that could keep them apart. Isn't that the beauty of it? This has been at the heart of the western philosophy of marriage.
Of course, at other times you can negotiate, and they get the tradeoffs rather than being absolute in their attitude, sticking to their guns, without thinking.
It is an ongoing commitment, a 'battle' of staying present, guiding them, drawing a line when necessary, and letting them win too... It is absolutely through contradictinction they will learn the most - what worked once, may or may not work again, behavior wise.... of course, there are absolutes - don't kill or hurt others, don't lie, cheat or steal...those are usually easier to teach. And then there's wisdom...that's lifetime learning.
A great book. It can also be read profitably in conjunction with Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High. School districts are weirdly tied to real estate in the U.S.; many places with good districts also have severe land-use control laws that prevent the creation of new housing units on a given parcel land; and, consequently, people will pay a lot of money for scarce housing that comes bundled with good school districts. Two-earner households make paying for the housing easier, but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile (especially considering the prevalence of divorce).
Rich people want nicer schools. These same people have a lot of influence and or control in our society, so they dictate how the money was divvied up, to make sure their kids got the best.
In many other countries the money is put into a large "pot" and then redistributed from that. So most schools per student budget is similar but with adjustments for cost of living. The US is actually the odd duck for how monied some public schools are, while depriving almost impoverishing others.
Charter schools only make the situation worse, since many utilise public funds while also charging parents (so effectively a private school that keeps poor kids out, but gets to utilise public money to do so).
I am talking about an issue of fairness. You're just pointing out the status quo.
Can you elaborate on that? It doesn't make sense to me. When we were on a single income in my family, it felt a lot more fragile than now that we have two incomes.
So, instead of having a household where you have one parent working to support the family and another parent who can occasionally add income but doesn't have to, now you have lots of people where they are fully tapped out and both parents are working full time.
As a couple with two high incomes you actually have to try really hard not to let expenses get to the point where you can't live without both incomes. So in effect you now have 1 big income that you rely on.
In terms of the fragility, there is more chance of losing 1 out of 2 jobs (i.e. 50% of the income) than there is of losing 1 out of 1 jobs (i.e. 100% of the income). (I hope I explained this right - but it's how my thinking goes).
There's three things you need to understand about personal finance:
1. The first is that shit happens and most people don't plan for it (because they haven't been educated on personal finance). Most resources suggest that you keep an emergency fund of 6-12 months of living expenses saved up for when shit happens. We know that most people do not have this. I'm not even going to bother providing a source because there are so many sources on how Americans don't save.
2. The number one expense for any given household is going to be housing (whether owned or rented).
3. While you can cutback on many things, you cannot cutback on a mortgage. So if there are permanent setbacks to your finances: someone loses their job and gets another one that pays less, someone gets hurt and can't work for a while or ends up on disability, someone has to stay home to take care of an unhealthy relative, etc, then you can be pretty much shit out of luck unless you're house has equity on it and you can sell and downsize (although most people will just take a loan out against their equity lol).
So these are the characters of our stage. If you get a mortgage based on 1 person's income and something happens, there is another person there to step up. This provides a powerful safety net for the family. If you get a mortgage based on both people's incomes, you are putting yourself at greater risk because if something were to happen to either person you would not be able to afford to keep your 15-30 year agreement. And the cost of getting out of that agreement is enormous (as we saw with the recent housing crash).
I encourage you to read more on personal finance. It's incredibly fascinating.
You realize that a lot of people don't have savings because they live paycheck to paycheck trying to survive?
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance
http://badmoneyadvice.com/2009/03/whats-wrong-with-the-milli...
Right now we pay more than what we'd like on rent, but next year we'll move to a cheaper place.
We're saving for a large down payment for when it comes time to buy a home. Also, we'll get a mortgage as if only one of us were working, we have already agreed on that. And we're planning on moving to a state with a low cost of living when that time comes.
So in our case, two incomes is pretty solid.
It is more fragile because 1) it encourages living well beyond your means and 2) the odds of job loss/income reduction is now doubled and the stakes are higher as the second partner can't get a job to pick of the slack in the event of job loss.
It goes back to the old observation that people living paycheck to paycheck on $30,000 tend to also live paycheck to paycheck if their income increases to $60,000.
So if there is a hypothetical one income family making $40,000/year is unable to pay bills instead of reducing spending (who wants to do that?) the other partner starts working. Their lifestyle tends to rise with income and now they are just getting by with $60,000/year and put themselves in a more fragile place. This is how people tend to behave.
Instead they could have reigned in on their expenses a bit and perhaps taken on a second income to save for a rainy day.
The way to do two incomes (if at all possible) is to base your standard of living on just one. Use the other income to invest, save, or fuck around (travel, dinner, etc.). This type of two income house is much less fragile as savings and investments can accumulate, emergencies are easily taken care of, and spending can be reeled in in case of financial heartship. Either way with two incomes savings should be a very high priority to reduce fragility.
So two income households certainly can be less fragile but often aren't in practice.
As a parent, I constantly think back to the 70s as a benchmark for open mindedness and freedom with my children. In my honest opinion, we've lost a lot of perspective and become much less tolerant. In Australia, someone called the police because children walked a short distance to the local park by themselves. Taking a photo at a swimming carnival is taboo. None of these attitudes were around in the 70s.
I felt the relationship aspects between adults missed the mark. Not only the relationship breakdown aspects, but the women and sex. That reminds me of the woman who runs she++ (a sexist business name that no one calls out) who said in a Forbes interview that sex was bad and a man thing. There is a social stigma in admitting that women can like sex. Even Sam Mechkovich from Ars commented about bond women not falling for bond in his Spectre review, because that's not a woman thing to like sex. My response to these people is "what's wrong with it?" Most of the women I know and respect are open about sex. That doesn't mean free sex, it means being open minded and confident in yourself to be free to speak your mind. My sort of people...
Ultimately, I lump all these social and parental problems down to Political Correctness. For the nay sayers, you can treat people with respect and not be PC. PC is a set of perverted rules that bully people into what to think.
I have been told, "You can't say that, we have to be open minded here" when expressing the belief that political correctness does more to damage discourse than almost any other idea in western society. Way to provide a demonstration of my point!
Consider how many things we accept as valid today (say opinions related to equality) were once almost blasphemous to mention. It would be arrogant of us to assume we are not making similar mistakes.
I suppose the lesson is to keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out.
there are couples like this because the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works. after ten years of this, you don't actually know your spouse any more - they've been living some life, but not one that you've had time to be a part of between your own career and your children.
this seems like an equally plausible explanation for this phenomenon, because when you sacrifice that much it must be for something and when someone else insinuates that maybe the sacrifice wasn't worth it, well, that would really piss you off...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_earning/shared_parentin...
I guess the hypothesis is you start to feel alone in your responsibilities and you lose touch with your spouse's life.
Who sets up their schedules like that in the middle class? Middle class jobs don't (typically) allow that one parent could work from 7-4 and another from 4-1am.
I think this has more to do with a kind of ethical posturing ("I am holier than thou") than it is about a sacred cow. There are parents who will give up their own interests for the sake of their children's interest, and not because there is peer-pressure to do so, or as a way to gain status within the community, or to be tyrannized by a cultural myth.
So thinking about it more, I think this article is BS -- not because the issues it raises are not true, but because it focused on the wrong thing.
There is also a spiritual and psychological transformation that takes place with becoming a parent.
Philosopher Ken Wilber had written extensively about modernity, and the way it throws pre-modern ideas such as the Great Chain of Being out the window, leaving members of modernity disconnected with their place in the universe. That's not to say that pre-modern ideas where they just told you where your place is a good idea. On the other hand, existential angst and a constant wondering of your place in society, in the world, in the universe as a whole is a constant them in the cultures of modernity.
What does this have to do with parenting? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is a kind of stand-in, or abstractions, that Ken Wilber claims ties the pre-modern religion together. They disagree on a lot of things, but one thing that is present in the religious teachings is putting the human experience in context of the cosmos as a whole. The search for the meaning of life was a search for your origins, of where you came from -- a search for who you were "born" from. It might seem obvious that your body was born from the DNA of both of your parents; however, where did they come from? If you trace things up your lineage, you still come to the question, "Where did life originate from?"
To use the mythic language in the context of the Great Chain of Being, you were "born" from the universe.
To become a parent is to experience -- just a little bit -- of what it is like for the universe to give life and creation. It might be accidental or intentional. Someone might enter this stage with naivete or with great wisdom. There are a lot of things you might have railed against growing up, but now as a parent, it makes you think and wonder.
My point is that, if you were to strip away the ethical posturing and political correctness, what you are left with is not a re-examination of parenting, that there is a sacred cow to be slaughtered. Parenting is an re-examination of your self and your place and purpose within the universe. Your growth does not stop there. You might gain a better appreciation of how things come together.
Recently did some pre-marital counseling where they recommend that you put your spouse above your children. Seemed really strange to me and counter-intuitive. I don't know much about marriage at all, but if you think about it, the trickle-down effect does seem to make sense as setting an example is a good lesson for kids.
I think the takeaway is to keep a balance. Also, it's not like Ayelet Waldman is a revolutionary, as other old-school practitioners seem to have been recommending that advice for years.
I believe this is incredibly important for a lasting, loving relationship. I've observed a few relationships where one partner's priority shifts so much to the children that the other partner is left with little love or consideration and their bond quickly degrades.
I could understand this behavior in a place where there's a shortage of food and resources, but in developed countries with an abundance of food and relative safety people are sabotaging their happiness and adult bonds by elevating developing humans above the person they originally committed to.
Additionally, some adults infantilize their household culture to the point where adult activities become a sort of taboo. I think we short-change children by not exposing them to regular adult behaviors and conversations. Certainly there are some things children should not be exposed to but the household should be as accommodating for old and young as possible. A healthy balance needs to be struck.
Your kids will adjust to the lifestyle you set for them and happy parents have more to give.
Granted, there are definitely parents who hover, worry, or interfere with their kids', but, at least in the circles I run in, these are the exception more than the rule and most certainly don't represent parents (or marriages) at large.
"The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on 1920."
Womens suffrage has to reverb through political sphere. As a whole it's not good or bad, just different. Another thing coming from there: time passed since women gained vote seems to correlate with welfare spending.
I don't think religious fervor can be avoided in a society. It's just a matter of where it is directed.
Ask the men, however, and it is almost always the wife.
And none of these folks were married or had kids yet. It is something ingrained from before that occurs.
1. They have more life-years ahead of them. 2. If I saved my wife, she would hate the choice I made and be plagued by survivor guilt or resentment. It's not clear that my marriage would survive this. But the kids are young enough that they would probably accept the choice, to the extent that they could comprehend it.
"Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought."
So divorce rates for empty nesters are the kids fault or kids are holding together marriages that were doomed before they left the nest? This article is garbage.